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Does God exist?
Tweet Topic Started: Dec 19 2006, 12:46 PM (1,364 Views)
Noname Dec 19 2006, 12:46 PM Post #1
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The Bible has said that one day he will come back and the Earth will be made a new. but is the Lord up there? Does He hears our prays?

For me I say yes!
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Noname Dec 19 2006, 01:17 PM Post #2
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If we do exist, there are only two possible explanations as to how our existence came to be. Either we had a beginning or we did not have a beginning. The Bible says, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1 :1). The atheist has always maintained that there was no beginning. The idea is that matter has always existed in the form of either matter or energy; and all that has happened is that matter has been changed from form to

form, but it has always been. The Humanist Manifesto says, "Matter is self-existing and not created," and that is a concise statement of the atheist's belief.

The way we decide whether the atheist is correct or not is to see what science has discovered about this question. The picture below on the left represents our part of the cosmos. Each of the disk shaped objects is a galaxy like our Milky Way. All of these galaxies are moving relative to each other. Their movement has a very distinct pattern which causes the distance between the galaxies to get greater with every passing day. If we had three galaxies located at positions A, B. and C in the second diagram below, and if they are located as shown, tomorrow they will be further apart. The triangle they form will be bigger. The day after tomorrow the triangle will be bigger yet. We live in an expanding universe that gets bigger and bigger and bigger with every passing day.



Now let us suppose that we made time run backwards! If we are located at a certain distance today, then yesterday we were closer together. The day before that, we were still closer. Ultimately, where must all the galaxies have been? At a point! At the beginning! At what scientists call a singularity!

A second proof is seen in the energy sources that fuel the cosmos. The picture to the right is a picture of the sun. Like all stars, the sun generates its energy by a nuclear process known as thermonuclear fusion. Every second that passes, the sun compresses 564 million tons of hydrogen into 560 million tons of helium with 4 million tons of matter released as energy. In spite of that tremendous consumption of fuel, the sun has only used up 2% of the hydrogen it had the day it came into existence. This incredible furnace is not a process confined to the sun. Every star in the sky generates its energy in the same way. Throughout the cosmos there are 25 quintillion stars, each converting hydrogen into helium, thereby reducing the total amount of hydrogen in the cosmos. Just think about it! If everywhere in the cosmos hydrogen is being consumed and if the process has been going on forever, how much hydrogen should be left?

Suppose I attempt to drive my automobile without putting any more gas (fuel) into it. As I drive and drive, what is eventually going to happen? I am going to run out of gas I If the cosmos has been here forever, we would have run out of hydrogen long ago! The fact is, however, that the sun still has 98% of its original hydrogen. The fact is that hydrogen is the most abundant material in the universe! Everywhere we look in space we can see the hydrogen 21 cm line in the spectrum_a piece of light only given off by hydrogen. This could not be unless we had a beginning!

A third scientific proof that the atheist is wrong is seen in the second law of thermodynamics. In any closed system, things tend to become disordered. If an automobile is driven for years and years without repair, for example, it will become so disordered that it would not run any more. Getting old is simple conformity to the second law of thermodynamics. In space, things also get old. Astronomers refer to the aging process as heat death. If the cosmos is "everything that ever was or is or ever will be," as Dr. Carl Sagan is so fond of saying, nothing could be added to it to improve its order or repair it. Even a universe that expands and collapses and expands again forever would die because it would lose light and heat each time it expanded and rebounded.

The atheist's assertion that matter/energy is eternal is scientifically wrong. The biblical assertion that there was a beginning is scientifically correct.

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Jane Dec 19 2006, 01:28 PM Post #3
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The human mind thinks in terms of beginnings and endings because that is the sum of our life experience. The truth of it would probably blow our little minds so we invent the god explanation. The god explanation gives us meaning and makes us feel safe, like we were meant to be.

God does not exist to me, but I'm open to there being a higher consciousness, a higher reasoning out there.
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Noname Dec 19 2006, 01:31 PM Post #4
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Is everyone on this board and atheist? And you're trying to recuit me to join in your guy's cult, huh?
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Noname Dec 19 2006, 01:42 PM Post #5
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But seriously look at all the mircales that have happen and there have been when I feel so close to HIM that I know I am going to Heaven. Are you telling me what I am grapsing on to is false hope and belief?
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la anaconda de chocolatee Dec 19 2006, 02:31 PM Post #6
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me being the life committed atheist that I am, I have a shitload to say but unfortunately my painful hand today will not permit. But I will copy some posts that I did on myspace with my opinion.

But to start off: if God created us and created the universe, then who created god? how did god come into being? Something had to start god, to make it possible for it to be in existence! How come believers argue that the universe couldnt possibly have always been, that it couldnt have been created from matter and energy alone, yet I have never once heard a believer question the same thing about god, question how god came into existence, how god was created. The answer is god has always been. But if you argue that there has to be a beginning and an end to the universe, then I argue that there has to be a beginning to god, a creation of god. So how was god created? and what created the thing that created god? so on and so on.

If it doesnt make sense that the universe has always been and that an all powerful being had to have created it, then I argue that it doesnt make sense that this all powerful being has always been, and something had to have created god. And what is that something that has created god, imo? The human race
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la anaconda de chocolatee Dec 19 2006, 02:37 PM Post #7
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here is a copy of the atheist manifesto, I had posted this here a few months ago as well as on myspace. But my sister also posted it, so I am copying it from her profile as well as my response and other responses on her myspace about it.


An Atheist Manifesto
by Sam Harris
Sam Harris argues against irrational faith and its adherents
Originally posted atTruthdig


Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture, and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of six billion human beings.

The same statistics also suggest that this girl's parents believe -- at this very moment -- that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?

No.

The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle. The obvious must be observed and re-observed and argued for. This is a thankless job. It carries with it an aura of petulance and insensitivity. It is, moreover, a job that the atheist does not want.

It is worth noting that no one ever need identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. Consequently, we do not have words for people who deny the validity of these pseudo-disciplines. Likewise, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma. The atheist is merely a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (eighty-seven percent of the population) who claim to "never doubt the existence of God" should be obliged to present evidence for his existence -- and, indeed, for his benevolence, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day. Only the atheist appreciates just how uncanny our situation is: most of us believe in a God that is every bit as specious as the gods of Mount Olympus; no person, whatever his or her qualifications, can seek public office in the United States without pretending to be certain that such a God exists; and much of what passes for public policy in our country conforms to religious taboos and superstitions appropriate to a medieval theocracy. Our circumstance is abject, indefensible, and terrifying. It would be hilarious if the stakes were not so high.

We live in a world where all things, good and bad, are finally destroyed by change. Parents lose their children and children their parents. Husbands and wives are separated in an instant, never to meet again. Friends part company in haste, without knowing that it will be for the last time. This life, when surveyed with a broad glance, presents little more than a vast spectacle of loss. Most people in this world, however, imagine that there is a cure for this. If we live rightly—not necessarily ethically, but within the framework of certain ancient beliefs and stereotyped behaviors—we will get everything we want after we die. When our bodies finally fail us, we just shed our corporeal ballast and travel to a land where we are reunited with everyone we loved while alive. Of course, overly rational people and other rabble will be kept out of this happy place, and those who suspended their disbelief while alive will be free to enjoy themselves for all eternity.

We live in a world of unimaginable surprises--from the fusion energy that lights the sun to the genetic and evolutionary consequences of this lights dancing for eons upon the Earth--and yet Paradise conforms to our most superficial concerns with all the fidelity of a Caribbean cruise. This is wondrously strange. If one didn't know better, one would think that man, in his fear of losing all that he loves, had created heaven, along with its gatekeeper God, in his own image.

Consider the destruction that Hurricane Katrina leveled on New Orleans. More than a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions, and nearly a million were displaced. It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Katrina struck believed in an omnipotent, omniscient and compassionate God. But what was God doing while a hurricane laid waste to their city? Surely he heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Only the atheist has the courage to admit the obvious: These poor people died talking to an imaginary friend.

Of course, there had been ample warning that a storm of biblical proportions would strike New Orleans, and the human response to the ensuing disaster was tragically inept. But it was inept only by the light of science. Advance warning of Katrina's path was wrested from mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God told no one of his plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence of the Lord, they wouldn't have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces. Nevertheless, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that 80% of Katrina's survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their faith in God.

As Hurricane Katrina was devouring New Orleans, nearly a thousand Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. There can be no doubt that these pilgrims believed mightily in the God of the Koran: Their lives were organized around the indisputable fact of his existence; their women walked veiled before him; their men regularly murdered one another over rival interpretations of his word. It would be remarkable if a single survivor of this tragedy lost his faith. More likely, the survivors imagine that they were spared through God's grace.

Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. Only the atheist realizes how morally objectionable it is for survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Because he refuses to cloak the reality of the world's suffering in a cloying fantasy of eternal life, the atheist feels in his bones just how precious life is--and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all.

One wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to shake the world's faith. The Holocaust did not do it. Neither did the genocide in Rwanda, even with machete-wielding priests among the perpetrators. Five hundred million people died of smallpox in the 20th Century, many of them infants. God's ways are, indeed, inscrutable. It seems that any fact, no matter how infelicitous, can be rendered compatible with religious faith. In matters of faith, we have kicked ourselves loose of the Earth.

Of course, people of faith regularly assure one another that God is not responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand the claim that God is both omniscient and omnipotent? There is no other way, and it is time for sane human beings to own up to this. This is the age-old problem of theodicy, of course, and we should consider it solved. If God exists, either he can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities or he does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil. Pious readers will now execute the following pirouette: God cannot be judged by merely human standards of morality. But, of course, human standards of morality are precisely what the faithful use to establish God's goodness in the first place. And any God who could concern himself with something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which he is addressed in prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that. If he exists, the God of Abraham is not merely unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.

There is another possibility, of course, and it is both the most reasonable and least odious: The biblical God is a fiction. As Richard Dawkins has observed, we are all atheists with respect to Zeus and Thor. Only the atheist has realized that the biblical god is no different. Consequently, only the atheist is compassionate enough to take the profundity of the world's suffering at face value. It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion--to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources--is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity. It is a necessity, however, that places the atheist at the margins of society. The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.

The Nature of Belief

According to several recent polls, 22% of Americans are certain that Jesus will return to Earth sometime in the next 50 years. Another 22% believe that he will probably do so. This is likely the same 44% who go to church once a week or more, who believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews and who want to stop teaching our children about the biological fact of evolution. As President Bush is well aware, believers of this sort constitute the most cohesive and motivated segment of the American electorate. Consequently, their views and prejudices now influence almost every decision of national importance. Political liberals seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from these developments and are now thumbing Scripture, wondering how best to ingratiate themselves to the legions of men and women in our country who vote largely on the basis of religious dogma. More than 50% of Americans have a "negative" or "highly negative" view of people who do not believe in God; 70% think it important for presidential candidates to be "strongly religious." Unreason is now ascendant in the United States--in our schools, in our courts and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28% of Americans believe in evolution; 68% believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.

Although it is easy enough for smart people to criticize religious fundamentalism, something called "religious moderation" still enjoys immense prestige in our society, even in the ivory tower. This is ironic, as fundamentalists tend to make a more principled use of their brains than "moderates" do. While fundamentalists justify their religious beliefs with extraordinarily poor evidence and arguments, at least they make an attempt at rational justification. Moderates, on the other hand, generally do nothing more than cite the good consequences of religious belief. Rather than say that they believe in God because certain biblical prophecies have come true, moderates will say that they believe in God because this belief "gives their lives meaning." When a tsunami killed a few hundred thousand people on the day after Christmas, fundamentalists readily interpreted this cataclysm as evidence of God's wrath. As it turns out, God was sending humanity another oblique message about the evils of abortion, idolatry and homosexuality. While morally obscene, this interpretation of events is actually reasonable, given certain (ludicrous) assumptions. Moderates, on the other hand, refuse to draw any conclusions whatsoever about God from his works. God remains a perfect mystery, a mere source of consolation that is compatible with the most desolating evil. In the face of disasters like the Asian tsunami, liberal piety is apt to produce the most unctuous and stupefying nonsense imaginable. And yet, men and women of goodwill naturally prefer such vacuities to the odious moralizing and prophesizing of true believers. Between catastrophes, it is surely a virtue of liberal theology that it emphasizes mercy over wrath. It is worth noting, however, that it is human mercy on display--not God's--when the bloated bodies of the dead are pulled from the sea. On days when thousands of children are simultaneously torn from their mothers' arms and casually drowned, liberal theology must stand revealed for what it is--the sheerest of mortal pretenses. Even the theology of wrath has more intellectual merit. If God exists, his will is not inscrutable. The only thing inscrutable in these terrible events is that so many neurologically healthy men and women can believe the unbelievable and think this the height of moral wisdom.

It is perfectly absurd for religious moderates to suggest that a rational human being can believe in God simply because this belief makes him happy, relieves his fear of death or gives his life meaning. The absurdity becomes obvious the moment we swap the notion of God for some other consoling proposition: Imagine, for instance, that a man wants to believe that there is a diamond buried somewhere in his yard that is the size of a refrigerator. No doubt it would feel uncommonly good to believe this. Just imagine what would happen if he then followed the example of religious moderates and maintained this belief along pragmatic lines: When asked why he thinks that there is a diamond in his yard that is thousands of times larger than any yet discovered, he says things like, "This belief gives my life meaning," or "My family and I enjoy digging for it on Sundays," or "I wouldn't want to live in a universe where there wasn't a diamond buried in my backyard that is the size of a refrigerator." Clearly these responses are inadequate. But they are worse than that. They are the responses of a madman or an idiot.

Here we can see why Pascal's wager, Kierkegaard's leap of faith and other epistemological Ponzi schemes won't do. To believe that God exists is to believe that one stands in some relation to his existence such that his existence is itself the reason for one's belief. There must be some causal connection, or an appearance thereof, between the fact in question and a person's acceptance of it. In this way, we can see that religious beliefs, to be beliefs about the way the world is, must be as evidentiary in spirit as any other. For all their sins against reason, religious fundamentalists understand this; moderates--almost by definition--do not.

The incompatibility of reason and faith has been a self-evident feature of human cognition and public discourse for centuries. Either a person has good reasons for what he strongly believes or he does not. People of all creeds naturally recognize the primacy of reasons and resort to reasoning and evidence wherever they possibly can. When rational inquiry supports the creed it is always championed; when it poses a threat, it is derided; sometimes in the same sentence. Only when the evidence for a religious doctrine is thin or nonexistent, or there is compelling evidence against it, do its adherents invoke "faith." Otherwise, they simply cite the reasons for their beliefs (e.g. "the New Testament confirms Old Testament prophecy," "I saw the face of Jesus in a window," "We prayed, and our daughter's cancer went into remission"). Such reasons are generally inadequate, but they are better than no reasons at all. Faith is nothing more than the license religious people give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail. In a world that has been shattered by mutually incompatible religious beliefs, in a nation that is growing increasingly beholden to Iron Age conceptions of God, the end of history and the immortality of the soul, this lazy partitioning of our discourse into matters of reason and matters of faith is now unconscionable.


Faith and the Good Society

People of faith regularly claim that atheism is responsible for some of the most appalling crimes of the 20th century. Although it is true that the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were irreligious to varying degrees, they were not especially rational. In fact, their public pronouncements were little more than litanies of delusion--delusions about race, economics, national identity, the march of history or the moral dangers of intellectualism. In many respects, religion was directly culpable even here. Consider the Holocaust: The anti-Semitism that built the Nazi crematoria brick by brick was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, religious Germans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, the religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued. (The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914.)

Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields are not examples of what happens when people become too critical of unjustified beliefs; to the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of not thinking critically enough about specific secular ideologies. Needless to say, a rational argument against religious faith is not an argument for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem that the atheist exposes is none other than the problem of dogma itself--of which every religion has more than its fair share. There is no society in recorded history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

While most Americans believe that getting rid of religion is an impossible goal, much of the developed world has already accomplished it. Any account of a "god gene" that causes the majority of Americans to helplessly organize their lives around ancient works of religious fiction must explain why so many inhabitants of other First World societies apparently lack such a gene. The level of atheism throughout the rest of the developed world refutes any argument that religion is somehow a moral necessity. Countries like Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on Earth. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as indicated by measures of life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate and infant mortality. Conversely, the 50 nations now ranked lowest in terms of human development are unwaveringly religious. Other analyses paint the same picture: The United States is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious literalism and opposition to evolutionary theory; it is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, STD infection and infant mortality. The same comparison holds true within the United States itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious superstition and hostility to evolutionary theory, are especially plagued by the above indicators of societal dysfunction, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms. Of course, correlational data of this sort do not resolve questions of causality--belief in God may lead to societal dysfunction; societal dysfunction may foster a belief in God; each factor may enable the other; or both may spring from some deeper source of mischief. Leaving aside the issue of cause and effect, these facts prove that atheism is perfectly compatible with the basic aspirations of a civil society; they also prove, conclusively, that religious faith does nothing to ensure a society's health.

Countries with high levels of atheism also are the most charitable in terms of giving foreign aid to the developing world. The dubious link between Christian literalism and Christian values is also belied by other indices of charity. Consider the ratio in salaries between top-tier CEOs and their average employee: in Britain it is 24 to 1; France 15 to 1; Sweden 13 to 1; in the United States, where 83% of the population believes that Jesus literally rose from the dead, it is 475 to 1. Many a camel, it would seem, expects to squeeze easily through the eye of a needle.

Religion as a Source of Violence

One of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the 21st century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns--about ethics, spiritual experience and the inevitability of human suffering--in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. Nothing stands in the way of this project more than the respect we accord religious faith. Incompatible religious doctrines have balkanized our world into separate moral communities--Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, etc.--and these divisions have become a continuous source of human conflict. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews versus Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians versus Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians versus Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants versus Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims versus Hindus), Sudan (Muslims versus Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims versus Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims versus Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists versus Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims versus Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite versus Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians versus Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis versus Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. In these places religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the last 10 years.

In a world riven by ignorance, only the atheist refuses to deny the obvious: Religious faith promotes human violence to an astonishing degree. Religion inspires violence in at least two senses: (1) People often kill other human beings because they believe that the creator of the universe wants them to do it (the inevitable psychopathic corollary being that the act will ensure them an eternity of happiness after death). Examples of this sort of behavior are practically innumerable, jihadist suicide bombing being the most prominent. (2) Larger numbers of people are inclined toward religious conflict simply because their religion constitutes the core of their moral identities. One of the enduring pathologies of human culture is the tendency to raise children to fear and demonize other human beings on the basis of religion. Many religious conflicts that seem driven by terrestrial concerns, therefore, are religious in origin. (Just ask the Irish.)

These facts notwithstanding, religious moderates tend to imagine that human conflict is always reducible to a lack of education, to poverty or to political grievances. This is one of the many delusions of liberal piety. To dispel it, we need only reflect on the fact that the Sept. 11 hijackers were college educated and middle class and had no discernable history of political oppression. They did, however, spend an inordinate amount of time at their local mosque talking about the depravity of infidels and about the pleasures that await martyrs in Paradise. How many more architects and mechanical engineers must hit the wall at 400 miles an hour before we admit to ourselves that jihadist violence is not a matter of education, poverty or politics? The truth, astonishingly enough, is this: A person can be so well educated that he can build a nuclear bomb while still believing that he will get 72 virgins in Paradise. Such is the ease with which the human mind can be partitioned by faith, and such is the degree to which our intellectual discourse still patiently accommodates religious delusion. Only the atheist has observed what should now be obvious to every thinking human being: If we want to uproot the causes of religious violence we must uproot the false certainties of religion.

Why is religion such a potent source of human violence?




Our religions are intrinsically incompatible with one another. Either Jesus rose from the dead and will be returning to Earth like a superhero or not; either the Koran is the infallible word of God or it isn't. Every religion makes explicit claims about the way the world is, and the sheer profusion of these incompatible claims creates an enduring basis for conflict.


There is no other sphere of discourse in which human beings so fully articulate their differences from one another, or cast these differences in terms of everlasting rewards and punishments. Religion is the one endeavor in which us-them thinking achieves a transcendent significance. If a person really believes that calling God by the right name can spell the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, then it becomes quite reasonable to treat heretics and unbelievers rather badly. It may even be reasonable to kill them. If a person thinks there is something that another person can say to his children that could put their souls in jeopardy for all eternity, then the heretic next door is actually far more dangerous than the child molester. The stakes of our religious differences are immeasurably higher than those born of mere tribalism, racism or politics.


Religious faith is a conversation-stopper. Religion is only area of our discourse in which people are systematically protected from the demand to give evidence in defense of their strongly held beliefs. And yet these beliefs often determine what they live for, what they will die for, and--all too often--what they will kill for. This is a problem, because when the stakes are high, human beings have a simple choice between conversation and violence. Only a fundamental willingness to be reasonable--to have our beliefs about the world revised by new evidence and new arguments--can guarantee that we will keep talking to one another. Certainty without evidence is necessarily divisive and dehumanizing. While there is no guarantee that rational people will always agree, the irrational are certain to be divided by their dogmas.




It seems profoundly unlikely that we will heal the divisions in our world simply by multiplying the opportunities for interfaith dialogue. The endgame for civilization cannot be mutual tolerance of patent irrationality. While all parties to liberal religious discourse have agreed to tread lightly over those points where their worldviews would otherwise collide, these very points remain perpetual sources of conflict for their coreligionists. Political correctness, therefore, does not offer an enduring basis for human cooperation. If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith.

When we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; when we have no reasons, or bad ones, we have lost our connection to the world and to one another. Atheism is nothing more than a commitment to the most basic standard of intellectual honesty: One's convictions should be proportional to one's evidence. Pretending to be certain when one isn't--indeed, pretending to be certain about propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable--is both an intellectual and a moral failing. Only the atheist has realized this. The atheist is simply a person who has perceived the lies of religion and refused
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la anaconda de chocolatee Dec 19 2006, 02:40 PM Post #8
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responses: (mine is the second response)




first off, kudos for forwarding a manifesto that contains such self-congratulatory words as "petulence" and "balkanized." that at the very least gives me some footing in mounting a response.



the bulk, nay, the entirety of this article positions atheism as a response to religious belief or the existence of god on the grounds that there is suffering in the world. "suffering = no god" is a retarded argument. no amount of suffering has ever caused the creator of something to simply not exist. to use that analogy, when a child grows up to become a heroin addict, by that logic his or her parents cease to have existed. where did the junkie come from then? i suppose you could call it a miracle were it not for the absence of god. the author goes on to describe the "lies" of religion and its inherent danger. while i will not argue that the practical application of religion can often become somewhat of a powder keg through which radicals can derive their own meaning, i don't think there is a mainstream religion that exists that isn't inherently built on the tenants loving your brother and fostering peace as a lifestyle choice. god or no god, that's a rather noble sentiment, which i would wager is the main reason that the purported 85 percent of america fits into that demographic.

of course the flip side of the argument against god is the reasoning behind rational behavior. in christianity, for example, there is the belief in a heaven and a hell. while the actual nature of these states of existence varies from scholar to scholar, the ultimate usage is readily apparent: your actions on earth dictate your place after death, necessitating consideration for your fellow man. in other words, harmony on earth = eternal peace. even atheists praise do-gooders. why should they, though? what difference does it make if you're nice to someone, or if you kill, or steal, or rape? without an eternity of existence any of those actions are for lack of a better word, ephemeral, and it won't matter what you do or say at any length in your life because there are no ultimate reprecussions. the article mentions the presidential requirement to acknowledge god, but while i think there should be a separation of church and state, i do feel that one of the reasons for this is that there is something in us that realizes the futility of a governing body and protective laws if we are not ultimately answering to something greater than ourselves. police and law enforcement are created with the intention of saving us from ourselves. that's what laws are for. but saving us from what? and frankly, why? so we can live out our tiny, godless lives without taking from someone else or being killed or the reverse of both? animals live by no such rules. i don't think ipods and prada bags make us that different.

personally, in response to the obviously enlightened writings of this particular thinker, i sync my thoughts on the subject of god up with the writings of thomas aquinas. namely, he creates scenarios that logically argue for another step, and that step is god. sam harris asks for the religious populace to offer up some evidence of god in light of all the suffering of the world. who's to say he/she/it even has a say at this juncture? aquinas (as smart a theologian or philosopher as has existed, i would wager) thought of existence as a loop. logically there is a beginning and and end to it, and they undoubtedly are connected. if you think of existence as spinning in that loop into perpetuity, you might take for granted the fact that at some point there had to have been nothing. what initiated that movement then? what caused the big bang? if something is in motion, it had to have that energy manifested in some way. there had to have been an "unmoved mover" that starts what then refuses to stop. i mean even science is starting to intersect with this theory...the big bang theory in and of itself presupposes that raw energy in the ether of nothingness congealed and released and provided the first particles of what would become existence. the universe didn't just come from nothing. something had to have created that which creates. i don't think of god as man in a white beard who smites the wicked. i think of god as the alpha of existence, something that was before everything that is and started a complicated process that eventually resulted in us. maybe that's not the popular definition, but its the one that makes the most sense. is there suffering in the world? yeah, there definitely is. is god the cause? only insofar as god (or whatever you'd like to call the unmoved mover) having initiated existence and by extension everything being his/hers/its fault. to use the popular reference, i think the hand of god is at the core of everything, but more as an intitiator than as something that has a direct involvement in events.

there is a reason that 85 percent of america believes in some sort of divine influence. i would guess that 85 percent of anyone who ever lived would agree. the vocal minority is more than entitled to their opinion. but a better argument than "people are hurting and the world is spontaneous, therefore god must not exist" would be needed before any of those 85 percent would lose faith.

PS: the statistics relating to the disparity between CEO earnings and their employees is an interesting spin on the fact that american CEOs make astronomical amounts of money in comparison to their international contemporaries. we live in a country with the likes of ted turner, bill gates, and rupert murdock. people flat out come to america to get rich. the disparity and its tenuous link to god is a weak argument at best and insulting to our intelligence at worst.




Posted by jed the humanoid on Sunday, October 08, 2006 at 6:37 AM
[Reply to this]



michele


I was a sociology major, but an atheist even before that. And there is a good explanation as to why 85% of people believe there is a god. It is called the crutch theory. Back thousands of years ago, before man had reached to the advancement of science as we have today, people did not have explainations as to why things in nature occured as they did. They didnt know why the sun rose and set, why stars shown in the night, why thunderstorms happened, etc etc. Because these things had not yet been able to be scientifically explained, they had to come up with a reason why everything was as it was, why there was disease, why some people died from plagues and some didn't, etc. So that is how all of the belief systems in a god or gods came to be throughtout varies cutltures around the world. Through the generations, these belief systems become so imeshed, they are passed down and taught throughtout the generations. It is a sociological fact that whether we are talking about 2000 years ago or the present day, people tend to get their values, attitudes, and belief systems from their parents, grandparents, etc. We tend to usually share the same ideologies from our families because that is what we were taught and raised in. At the same time, being that we also live within a much larger society, we also aquire some values, attitudes, and beliefs from the greater society, and of course all of our social norms come from society but are taught to us by our parents and other important adults in our life as we grow up such as teachers, politicians, etc.



So people needed something to believe in, they needed explanations regarding death and natural phenomina. They needed it so that they can get through their lives, live their lives as productive, happy and well adjusted human beings. Which is great, that is fine. There is nothing wrong with that. But now in the modern age, as science is able to prove or show probable theories as to the whys of the many mysteries of earth and the human species, the belief in a god and the probabilty that a god exists, without any real proof of a god's existence, becomes more unlikely, more irrational and for some of us, just simply not needed.



I dont really care all that much if there is a god of some sort or not. I just simply dont need to believe in any type of higher power to get through life, and I certainly am not going to believe that if something terrible happens to me, that god is going to be the one to get me through it, or if I have an accomplishment, that god is responsible. No one is responsible for my achievements, or for how I deal with and get through a tradgedy or a setback in life other than myself. I believe in myself. I am a good person because I am a human being who has a conscious and I dont want to inflict pain on others. And the second part of the reason why I dont other than having a conscious is because I am part of a society, a society that has set up many incricate norms and sanctions regarding human interactions and behaviors that tells me and teaches me that hurting others or endangering others is bad, and that there will be consequences. You say that the reason why we have laws is because of a belief in a higher power. No, we have laws because there are 300 million people in this country, and that is a lot of people, which means that we live in a very large society. Society can only exist because we all work collaboratively to make it function. Places of business, for which we all contribute either has an owner, and employee, or as a consumer are functions of society. Society cannot exist without economic commerce and all of us participating in it. Marriage is not a religious right, but is more so an institution, it is a functioning construction of society. Most people nowadays to get married because they fall in love. But originally marriage had nothing to do with love, and was contructed do to a need in society for an orgainized family structure needed for agricultural and merchant purposes.

If we did not have laws to abide by, society could not exist. Every human would do as they pleased and chaos would ensue or a daily basis. It would be every man for himself, and as you can imagine, the human race would not survive very long if we all acted and interacted with each other on a dog eat dog mentality. We would have been extincted as a species a long time ago. Even many other animal species, function in some type of societal configuration. The difference between us and animals is that we have conscious, we have more intricate levels of emotions, which is why we cannot live as primatively as they do and survive as a species. That is why we have to function in a society, which is why we need laws. Religion or the belief in god is another social contruction that is essential to society, some societies more than others. It helps to keep the masses happy and gives them more purpose to function in society and play our parts to keep society going., We all have our role to fullfill in society, most of us have several roles or parts that we play. Some people need that belief system in a higher power to play out their roles. Good for them, that is great. If it keeps them mentally stable, all the more power to their belief system. Some of us do not need that belief system to still be a function human being and member of society. And the more scientifically advanced we become, then maybe the more of us there will be that will need that belief system, and maybe not. Maybe it wont matter. Maybe the majority of human beings need that no matter what. Who knows.


Posted by michele on Monday, October 23, 2006 at 8:22 AM
[Reply to this]



michele

oh and I forgot to touch on your point that something had to create the energy that started the big bang. I have heard this arguement before, from people who have said that even if the earth was created by the big bang, or expansion of the universe, and not specifically by this all powerful being of a god that most religions believe, then my arguement to you is, WHO CREATED GOD? If the compacted tiny particle, singular point of energy that many physicts believe started the big bang was in fact created by a higher being so that the big bang would happen and planets would form and life could sprout on some of these planets, then the same arguement goes for god that nothing can exist without being created by something. So who created god then? And then what created that being that created god? And so forth, that can just go on and on and on. If there is some type of god, then how did that god come into existence? It had to come from somewhere, some type of creation. Then how did the being or matter that created god come into being? What created that?

Posted by michele on Monday, October 23, 2006 at 10:22 AM
[Reply to this]



E


to the person above,

You have entirely too much time on your hands to respond to this blog with such a detailed response. please turn off your computer and walk away. its nice outside.

AND to the arguement, i do not have faith in any religion, i just don't have the care to, i believe in myself. I don't need a god to believe in to give me false hope.

thank you.


Posted by E on Monday, October 16, 2006 at 6:01 AM
[Reply to this]



Kelly


I can't seem to grasp why those who consider themselves athiest exert the time and energy to explain what they don't believe in. If you don't believe something exists then what it the rationale to talk about it.

Religion is something personal and I feel each person interprets whatever religion they believe in, if any, to apply to themselves and what they have gone through in their lives. As a dogma, religion provides a structure to how to live a moral life. Whether you choose to take this literally is dependant on the individual. To say that God does not exist because death, destuction, and loss do exist is ridiculous. You cannot appreciate what it is like to be happy without ever being sad.

I personally believe that there is purpose in all things that occur and that we may not see the full picture until we are able to.


Posted by Kelly on Wednesday, November 01, 2006 at 7:39 PM
[Reply to this]



K. West


And I agree that each is to their own.... However, I get judged and critized more by religious people then anyone for not having the same belief as they do. I am the one usually trying to avoid the subject but when people find out that I do not have any religion, or no belief in god, I get lectured on why I should believe in it and how I am wrong for not. I get told I am "Going to hell" or my "My marrige will not mean anything". I feel that extremely religious people claim that they don't judge people, but yet they are usually the first to judge and turn their backs on someone because of their religion, lifestyle, ect. That's all I need to say. Kel, you have living with me for 2 years and already know how I think! XOXOXOXO


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Kehlili Dec 19 2006, 02:48 PM Post #9
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Well I'm a philosophy major so its gonna take me a lot longer than a break inbetween pages of my essay to answer this question. I believe there is some higher force out there, but I don't believe it is personalized. I believe each culture throughout time made it in terms they could understand. In a time when people basically lived a simply subsistance lifestyle surrounded by nature, it was nature religions, God was in the wind in the water. . . later people became more sedentary and set up civilizations, but each person live a very segragated live, you were what your father was, life was very rigid. In that time you got many Gods, each one with a specific job and temperance. Next step was affluent societies, Egypt being the first where you see a monotheistic relgion. I believe as news began to spread more, and people became more aware of all going around them, as well as more mobility (though still rigid by all means) in society a monothesitic God became feasible. I also believe the movement from tribe to city had something to do with this as you had longer lasting monarchies rather than tribal leaders often gaining power by force. While society allowed them to see a multi-faced God, the permance of government allowed them to see a god throughout eternity.

I understand there are exceptions to this rule, but I believe that overall this theory makes sense to me at least lol.

That said, I do not believe in Jesus as the son of God, hundreds were cruicified that same year for the same crime, he just had the best story. I believe he may have been a powerful shaman who knew how to take advantage of a political gap waiting to be filled. I do beleive he excited as a historical man.

I believe religion when its personal is a good thing, I believe relgion on a massive scale is evil. No religion in looking for converts has stuck to its true message. Christainity was a peasants relgioin preaching equality, and included women priests. I do not believe this is the message of the Catholic church today. At the very least it was not its historical message. Traditional Islam teaches that all men are equal to God and does not preach the extreme treatment of women that you see in Muslim countries today. It does say that a man can take more than one wife but this is only if he can support her and is really just a way to provide for women who cannot provide for themselves in such a society. Finally, even Buddhism has evolved to get converts. Buddha never claimed to be a diety, he only claimed to be "awake". There is no God in Buddhism. Yet, in many sects of Buddhism Buddha is treated as such. And every religion preaches tolerance, yet in so many cases it seems leaders only want it apply to them.

Like I said, personal religion I have no problem with, I think it can help fullfill someone and makes people think of deeper issues in what can be a very plastic reality. Its just when organized religion tries to turn others than I have a major problem. And I believe in force, without a face, that people have melded into something they understand. Jesus, like many in the Bible, Torah, and Quran, is a historical figure. And I believe that if heaven exists it is outside of time and outside the physical world in which individuality is abolished. And I am writing a paper this semester which proves it dammit! lol
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Noname Dec 19 2006, 06:35 PM Post #10
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I cannot read all that. I have a limited amount of time. But people need to believe there is some kind of "God" out there. They have to believe that there is a Lord and that He is watching over them. Now, I would be the first to argue that my God maybe diffrent from a racial homphobic person's God, but my God has manifest out of that into an all loving God. There are so many religons in the world that it is impossible to say which one is right and which one is false. If the Christrians are right, what of the muslims and the buddist, what will happen to those who do not believe in Him. I believe wars are mostly started over religons. People use religons as a basis to gave power, i.e. Bush, and then they use that power to scare people into believeing what they want you to believe. My God, the one I believe in, is an all loving God. You don't have to believe in Him, you just have to be a good person and you will go to Heaven.
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Noname Dec 19 2006, 06:39 PM Post #11
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So we all have some version of the Lord. Everyone that is except Michele. But who created us? Who created the universe? Who are we to say that what someone believes in is wrong?
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la anaconda de chocolatee Dec 19 2006, 07:57 PM Post #12
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darrelle, you said that everyone HAS to believe in some type of god, that is false. No one has to believe in a god, I have never believed in a god and I get along in my life quite well, in fact a hell of a lot better than most people who are believers. And I am not the only one, far from it. There are a few million atheists throughout the world.And again, you keep saying something had to create the universe, but you did not address who or what created god? if there is a god, and if the universe had to have been created by someone or something, then someone or something had to create a god, and someone or something also had to create the being that created god, and so on.
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Kehlili Dec 19 2006, 07:57 PM Post #13
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I disagree, people do not have to believe in a God. People do, I believe, have a natural need to feel order and purpose. This can be seen in sight ironically enough. We look for patterns in everything we see. This has an evolutionary aspect, helping us to adapt new information, but I think it also shows a human want to see reason in the world around us. That said, I feel that for some, a god produces this. For others, science, or simply living a "good" life accomplishes the same thing. And I do not believe that anyone can be truly good if they are doing it for a god. I believe to be truly good one must do an action without thinking of how it affects themselves. If I help someone because it is what god wants, not only does it show a lower level of moral thought but it also means that I am expecting some kind of reward for this action, why else should I care what god thinks?

I do not believe the universe it preordaned, that is that a god said let it be and it was. I believe this force I was talking about is part of the natural order of the universe, its like another layer. It may have exsisted prior to the big bang or what not and been a component in the universe's creation but I do not believe it caused it. As for those who would argue for intelligent design, I once again offer patterns, we look for order, so we see it in the world. But there are many examples of things which do not make sense, pandas? haha Besides we cannot at this time make any generalizations about the universe, we have seen too little of it.

And no one can say what anyone else thinks is wrong, thats why the religion debate will never cease. I can fight you specific incidences, but I can't ever tell you what you believe is wrong for several reasons, we cannot argue over tastes, there are no words to describe them and therefore we cannot truly convey them nor can we truely have an agrument on them. What you see as good I may see as bad and thats as far as we can ever take it. I think religious arguments are good, but only to help someone form an opinion which works for them.
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Kehlili Dec 19 2006, 08:04 PM Post #14
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Michelle, about what you said about god, even if you take god out of time (which would also take him out of the physical world) you still get this problem:

1)God, by definiton is the most powerful being
2)If there was another being, more powerful, we would call him God
3)As most powerful, he must be able to do anything
4)God cannot create a being greater than himself
5)There is no God.


Basically what the argument (which I can't name, sorry I forget!) is saying is that God must be able to do anything, but by definition that means the negative of any action as well. If God is the most powerful than he must be able to lift any rock on earth. But because of this, he would be unable to create a rock which he cannot lift, thus there is something God cannot do. It is impossible to have a being which can do anything, and since the definition of God, at least in the western world, is basically the most powerful being (taking personality and history out of the equation), therefore there can be no God.
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la anaconda de chocolatee Dec 19 2006, 08:05 PM Post #15
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I like your philosphy kelly! So well spoken you are!
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Kehlili Dec 19 2006, 08:08 PM Post #16
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Thanky! I was raised in a very religious family but had a father who wanted me to find my own religion. So I had a lot of objective lessons on religion on my life. I'm also a philosophy minor and history major haha. Basically, morality and religion is something I just love to discuss and think about! I'd go to semenary school just to learn more about the bible and such but I don't want to have to live by their laws lol
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Jane Dec 19 2006, 08:58 PM Post #17
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I don't have time to read all this either, but it is a cracking debate!!!

Darrelle don't feel like we're trying to convert you or even change your opinion, for me and I assume most of us we just say what we think, it's up to everyone else if they like our interpretation or not.


The reason I think we made God and not the other way around is because we even made him in our image! God looks like a human male, Jesus really was one of us! Who's to say the creator of the world (if there was one) isn't some big green alien monster thing!?

We attribute the good things we see, like miracles, or that feeling you get when everything's going right, like you're on top of the world.....well we see it in terms of what we already believe. For most people religious beliefs are passed down from parents and other family members. Hence christians produce christian children, muslims produce Muslim children, very rarely do people of one faith convert to another. None are right or wrong, it just feels right because they have had this version of who God is drummed into them from birth.
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Kehlili Dec 19 2006, 11:58 PM Post #18
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Jane, I think you have a valid point with we believe what we have grown up with but I think thats starting to change in today's society. I went to church every Sunday growing up. I went to bible school on sundays and bible camp in the summer. I was part of a church youth group, and my family went to Christain camping places in the summer. But I also came from an area where I had a lot of exposure to other religions. I had a lot of Jewish friends in particular. I was also Protestant in a mainly Catholic area. There were a lot of kids who refered to themselves as Cashews, Catholice Jews. I guess what I'm trying to say is that in today's society, we are surrounded by people with different views, and we see a lot of other views as well, both in education and on the tv. Did you know that Huston Smith's series on religion in the 1950s was the first time people had seen Buddhism or yoga? Think about how much we hear about Kabbalah o today. I think we are entering a period where people pick and choose their religious beliefs rather than subscribing to one in particular, at least among those who attend (or have attended college. I make this distinction only because I believe college is a great help in helping people reflect on themselves and experience different things, only because while you have something in common with everyone there (age, location) everyone comes from different places and pasts and as it is outside of everyone's comfort zone (at first) this is when we can make our biggest growth. I think this is why you see the spreading of Buddhist philosphy, especially among those in the sciences lately. A lot of people are one religion and Buddhist because it is so applicable to other religions.
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Julesy Dec 20 2006, 12:58 AM Post #19
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aww shite. i just posted in here and it disappeared! :priest
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la anaconda de chocolatee Dec 20 2006, 01:51 AM Post #20
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1)God, by definiton is the most powerful being
2)If there was another being, more powerful, we would call him God
3)As most powerful, he must be able to do anything
4)God cannot create a being greater than himself
5)There is no God

I still argue that God could not just be, he had to have come from somewhere and something and if there is no explanation for how an all powerful god to have come into existence, then that most likely means that there is not a god. If god is the most powerful thing and therefore there couldnt have been something before it more powerful to have created it, then etiher there is no god or god created itself which I just dont see how that could have been possible.
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